This is, obviously, a low budget movie with a fairly predictable "man on the run" plot. Leaving that aside ...
The opening credits are as good as anything Saul Bass did in the wake of "Anatomy of a Murder."
The jazz score is wonderful, and it is not the composer's fault that the director chose to turn up the volume so high that it becomes intrusive at times and even overrides the dialogue. There is a proto-Peter-Gunn feel to it that is really better than this film deserves.
There are some nice location shots around Los Angeles, and the scenes of the teens dancing at the hamburger joint are almost documentary-like in their naturalness.
Nice cars! Nice bus! Nice short-bed newspaper delivery truck! The hot little convertible and the young male lead give the whole affair the air of an episode of "77 Sunset Strip."
The director seems to come from a planet where people's faces are not important but their shoes, legs, and waists are. Shot after shot is deliberately set up to scope out men's shoes and trousers. The result is almost fetishistic, but, weirdly enough, kind of "manly" at the same time.
The bizarre angle shots in the sterile modern rooms look forward to the 1965 French New Wave Science Fiction / Film Noir cult classic "Alphaville" by Jean-Luc Godard -- only not ironic.
The sleazy exploitation subplot, including underwear-clad escorts, a ridiculous cat-fight, men slapping women around and roughing them up, and multiple negligee scenes, are spectacular examples of what happens when a demented director tries to interject a bevy of pretty young "blonde models" with no acting experience into a noirish crime drama.
Some of the actors are wooden and many of the interior scenes were badly miked, so there are unexpected echoes. and the resultant efforts to correct these deficiencies with overdubbing are failures. So what? Who cares?
The build-up of violence has an early Coen Brothers feel to it, somewhere between "Blood Simple" and "Miller's Crossing," only without their great dialogue. In fact, there is very little dialogue in this film at all, and some of what there is seems improvised.
The ending is completely over the top and veers off into Quentin Tarantino territory, and the denouement is a sweet heartbreaker, and entirely unexpected.
I gave this movie a solid "7" because i think it should be shown to all aspiring film-makers. It is a fascinating study in good intentions that do not quite make it to a professional level. It is not a travesty, like an Ed Wood film, but it is just enough below the threshold of what you are expecting that you wish Raymond Burr, Frank Cady, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, and Sterling Hayden had been in the cast, and that the director had been Edgar G. Ulmer.
